The easy way to discover if a PDF file contains ‘structured content’

Because it turned out that people wanted to extract text from PDFs (and not just view them), Adobe added a feature called marked content. This allows the PDF file to contain additional tags as information, preserving the structure of the text. However, this feature needs to be used in the creation of the PDF – otherwise the additional information is not there!

There is a very easy way to tell if the PDF file has been created in this way. Open the file in Acrobat Reader and look at the properties menu – the Tagged PDF menu option (bottom left entry on the advanced section) tells you if the PDF contains these extra tags. This file does not.

So this PDF file will contain only limited structure tags.

If you can create Tagged PDF, it is worth setting this on by default – the files are not much larger and it makes text extraction much more viable if you need it in the future.

This post is part of our “Understanding the PDF File Format” series. In each article, we discuss a PDF feature, bug, gotcha or tip. If you wish to learn more about PDF, we have 13 years worth of PDF knowledge and tips, so click here to visit our series index!

Mark Stephens has been working with Java and PDF since 1999 and has diversified into HTML5, SVG and JavaFX.
He also enjoys speaking at conferences and has been a Speaker at user groups, Business of Software, Seybold and JavaOne conferences. He has a very dry sense of humor and an MA in Medieval History for which he has not yet found a practical use.

Mark Stephens has been working with Java and PDF since 1999 and has diversified into HTML5, SVG and JavaFX.

He also enjoys speaking at conferences and has been a Speaker at user groups, Business of Software, Seybold and JavaOne conferences. He has a very dry sense of humor and an MA in Medieval History for which he has not yet found a practical use.

Thanks Mark for a great article! I was rather confused about this issue (needed to extract some data from a pdf and didn’t have a clue), and your blog was very informative and helpful. Keep the great posts coming!